wasn’t always true: that virtually every pain patient could be prescribed bottles of narcotics without risk of addiction. This, in turn, led to the idea that pills could be prescribed in large amounts for long periods to almost anyone. As a species, we have five thousand years of experience with the opium poppy. It contains a substance that is both the best painkiller we know and the most intensely addictive. Yet beginning in the mid-1990s and for years after we decided that only one of those was true.
